The Concord Hotel was a lavish hotel that had existed for over 60 years until it closed down in the 1990’s, publicly due to mismanagement and bankruptcy. But like with most mismanagement, the detailed story was even more embarrassing.
The Concord Hotel had key tags on all its 1500 room keys. On one side of each tag was the specific room number. But on the other side was the worst blunder a hotel could ever make: putting the address of the hotel on the key tags to “guarantee postage”. This “guarantee” was only under the premise that people would even take the time to throw the keys in a mailbox, which was as rare as it was expected.
Back then, most guests didn’t return their keys. Instead, they’d either lose them, give them away to other people, or just throw them in the garbage, instead of throwing in a nearby mailbox as the hotel anticipated. It’s no wonder that other people would find them, and drive to the hotel, find the room and use it for free, and/or steal belongs of current paying guests.
My father’s family, including my older brother and I had spent many Passover holidays at the Concord Hotel, and so I knew many people who were in the practice of not returning hotel room keys, including my father, many of his friends and others. There were just as many people against it as there were who did it.
During my high school years, one of my friends had the newspaper on him, and was telling me about the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Concord Hotel had to pay out in lawsuits to people who lost property, retainment fees for lawyers, insurance to cover it all, as well as all the lost revenue from scofflaws staying in the hotel for free. I’m sure glad I was raised by my grandparents, who were a lot more honest to see that this was wrong.
I talked to other people about it but, like with a lot of wrongdoing, would turn a blind eye to it all. They’d just come up with lines to avoid remorse such as:
“The hotel is rich. They can afford it”.
“Some people have no time to return keys of others.”
“Why would you care? You are too young to understand.”
“If the Concord Hotel cared about the matter, they’d have done something about it, but they don’t care.”
This whole situation wasn’t even a security issue, but more so a common sense one. What ever happened to the Golden Rule? It’s been years since I started questioning things people do, which is why nowadays I am not surprised when bad things like this happen.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++